Sam Hewitt

THE Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway is racing flat out to have its new Broadway terminus ready for the first public trains on March 30. The railway has been handed a massive boost by supportive Wychavon Borough Council, which has agreed to pay for a £580,000 car park, with a 99-vehicle capacity, between Evesham Road and Childswickham…

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CHANNEL 4 has succeeded where Victorian entrepreneurs and engineers failed: to build a railway the complete length of Scotland’s Great Glen. In 1883, a scheme to build a line from Glasgow via Loch Lomondside and Glencoe to Fort William and Inverness was proposed under the banner of the Glasgow & North Western Railway. The aim…

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THE Swanage Railway has decided to delay the full second year of its ground-breaking diesel-hauled services to Wareham. While hugely successful in terms of passenger numbers, the service ran at a loss because of the cost of hiring an outside party to run them, and having to use diesels at both ends because of the…

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Two tickets issued to mid-Victorian rail travellers will feature in Paddington Ticket Auctions’ sale in central London on January 27. They are a Great Eastern first-class single into London from what was then rural Essex, and a South Staffordshire Railway journey of just 1½ miles. The GER ticket is dated April 25, 1867, and was…

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One of the recurring themes of the current railwayana auction scene is the resilience of the Jubilee nameplate market. They keep coming, and they keep selling, as was illustrated at Talisman’s sale at Newark on November 25, when Bellerophon from No. 45694 outsold the opposition with a price of £8000. And not only was this…

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Two express locomotive nameplates – Holland-Afrika Line and Lord President – tied for top spot in the railwayana section of a collectables auction held by Tennants of Leyburn, North Yorkshire, on November 24, each going under the hammer for £18,000. The former was from Oliver Bulleid-designed Merchant Navy Pacific No. 35023, built by BR at…

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When nameplate combines with badge – regimental, coat-of-arms, or whatever – the hammer invariably falls in the upper echelons of an auction’s realisation list, and Great Central’s sale at Stoneleigh on December 2 was no exception, when Isle of Man from LMS Patriot No. 45511 sold for £26,000, almost double that of the runner-up. That…

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